Scott Spencer

“Like most people, I find my own experiences - and my emotional responses to those experiences - fascinating and mysterious, even those that are a bit shaming and a little repellent.”

“I wanted to tell you that the man who is your father, the man who gave you life, has found a woman who is in heaven when she's in his arms.”

“With writing, you really have to have faith. You have to have some sort of confidence that if you keep at it, you will get where you need to go, because there are so many points where a rational person would quit.”

“It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real?”

“No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her.”

“I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.”

“It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility - a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.”

“That's sort of the amazing thing about writing something down and then having it printed and published - it's frozen. It's there. It's set. It's in ink. It's done. Nothing changes it.”